Mumbai edit: Worship of wealth

Friday’s decision of the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay high court to stay the appointment of the new Shri Shirdi Saibaba Sansthan board comes as a slap for Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan. The court’s decision came just two days after the chief minister announced the setting up of the new board.

When the high court had dissolved the Shirdi Sansthan board on March 13, its orders were explicit. It gave the state government 15 days to set up a fresh board but directed it to first formulate norms for the appointments. On the fifteenth day the chief minister announced the constitution of a new board with the same old members while mentioning nothing about the rules under which they had been appointed.

As it turns out, all the members on the board are there by virtue of their affiliation with the state’s two ruling parties that are currently at war with each other. Clearly, whatever be their differences, neither the Congress nor the NCP is particularly keen to put a proper system in place and bring transparency to the functioning of Maharashtra’s richest shrine.

In fact, it was the shrine’s wealth that attracted the attention of the state’s politicians and, in 2003, the assembly passed a law that gave the government the power to appoint the trustees. While such laws across the country are passed in the name of improving accountability, all that actually happens is that control of the immense wealth of these shrines passes into the hands of politicians whose interests lie more in the temporal world than in the spiritual.

It is a pity that in a so-called progressive state like Maharashtra, with a politician seen as Mr Clean at the helm of affairs, even places of worship cannot escape the venal grasp of politicians and criminals.